A new idea, that I actually complete!

Golly, I have a lot of ideas.
Don't we all?
But it's often the mediocre, the mainline, the hard-working toiling regular folk who get stuff finished. And by that I mean, the people who put their nose to the grindstone and get from point A to point B. No fussing about it. These are the people who get their stuff published, their songs sung, their inventions patented (or inventions they steal from someone else who doesn't have the initiative to patent). I personally know one girl from my home town who went to Mexico and saw that some guy on the street was making simple hair clasps out of shells. She stole his idea and now is living on an easier street.
This got me thinking: I need to complete something and I need to do it NOW!

So here's what this blog will become: the blog of ideas.
If it's a blog of ideas, then I really don't have to complete it. It can be a work in progress, and then that way it will be complete all the time at whatever stage you find it.

And I feel like this is something we can share. With the whole world! You can add to this blog with your own ideas. Every week I will post an idea. It will have a theme, it will have ingredients, materials or stuff that might be needed to complete. This week, the idea will be projects involving concrete. Go!

Will write

I've decided to commit a theme to this blog. I'm still trying to decide what that will be.

Win, lose

My girlfriends and I came in second for the annual Figgy Pudding Street Caroling competition this year. We took the We Three Kings tune from the Roaches, changed the lyrics to We Three Queens and wrote a fun roast about our two senators, Patty Murray and Maria Cantrell — and our gov, Christine Gregoire. We had a friend hold up huge posters of our elected officials' heads and then we kicked ass! Unfortunately, we lost the applause-a-thon to a troupe of tap dancers who, you guessed it (or maybe you didn’t) tap danced during their applause thereby winning, even though they basically sucked in a Lawrence Welk kind of way. Lame-e-oh.

Cabi Hi-School Parhti

You know those in-home parties where a host provides wine and triscuits and then someone from Tuppergroove International presents an item, like a blue duck home accessory? All the guests are supposed to get excited about this duck-thing and buy one so the hostess can get her own blue duck for free. I went to one of those drink-and-buy events, it was a Cabi party at a friend's house.

Let me explain a Cabi party:
You drink wine and eat non-greazy finger foods while you whoop it up with your gal pals. Then all of a sudden, you are rudely interrupted by a bubbly woman attired in Cabi who rolls a closet full of clothes into the midst of your once-promising party. She then makes you shut up so she can tell you about the "Cabi philosophy." While she's blabbering, you drink more wine, and then you buy a bunch of clothes that your mom would love to see you wearing. I'm not saying these aren't nice clothes, they just aren't YOUR clothes, generally. They are classic and will go with just about everything.

The one and only time I ever attended one of these parties I was asked repeatedly to "Shhhh ..." by one of my neighbors who collects Lingonberry baskets. I was with my sister who cannot shut up for the life of her -- and I gladly follow her down a path of disengagement whenever we're together. So, negative experience at the Cabi party for moi.

Fast forward a couple years ...

I walk in the house and the phone rings. It's my girlfriend Mia and she says "Hey, you want to carpool on Friday?"
"What's going on Friday?"
"Oh, you know, that Cabi party at M's" (M's not her name, I just don't want Mia's chances of being invited to another Cabi party jeopardized.)
"M's having a party?" I ask.
Silence.
"Ohhhhh ... I'm so soooorry. Well, I wasn't really thinking of going anyway unless you were."
What's Mia doing giving me that sympathetic "I'm-so-sorry"? I don't want to go to that party anyway and most of my friends know that about me. Except, apparently, M. After reassuring Mia that my feelings are not hurt, I get off the phone. And that's when I notice I have a couple phone messages.
I hit the play button.
Another friend is asking if I'm going to the party.
I delete the message.
Now I'm wondering "Why didn't M invite me.?" C'mon, I'm good enough for laughs. I must drink too much wine, eat too many non-greazy finger foods ...

I listen to the next message. It's Mary calling from out of town. I realize that I have many friends whose names begin with "m."

"Tracy, I'm on Orcas right now so I won't be able to go to the Cabi party at M's. Would you please let her know when you see her there that I didn't have her phone number and so I couldn't call her myself. Thanks!"

Weird. Everyone I know is being invited -- or at least all friends whose names begin with "m."

So I call my other friend whose name begins with an "m" to find out if she's been invited. I have an "m" hypothesis based on evidentiary evidence.

"Hey Marin, you invited to the Cabi party this Friday?" I ask her.
"No, who's having a Cabi party?"
So I tell her and we have a good laugh, clearly this is not letter racism. I get off the phone.

One day before the event, (which I now refer to as a very snappy "M's Cabi Parhti!") I pick up the phone, because it was ringing, and it's M herself.

"Tracy, my daughter and your daughter want a sleep over tonight, which is fine by me because I'm having a Cabi party. Is that OK with you if she stays over at your house? I really don't want her to be bored here if she could just sleep over at a friend's house instead."
I am grinning ear to ear.
"Why no problem, we'd love to have her. By the way, Mary wanted you to know she can't make it tonight. She's on Orcas."
...
"I told her I'd let you know."
"Oh, thanks. Well, I've got to get ready, I'm sooooo busy with trying to get this house all together before tonight!"

Sure, you betcha.

Later that night Marin decided to throw an impromptu party over at her house with some other friends and Mia. I was invited and it was fun to laugh loudly with all the "m"s and other letters I call my dearest friends.

A cry for something

A recent e-mail I sent to some friends of mine:
Hey guys,
OK, this is going to make me sound like I’m having serious issues with everything in my life, but you all might have a pulse on who’s good and who isn’t in the areas of health care and well-being.

I need a dentist who doesn’t think everyone in my family needs jaw surgery, and a doctor who will prescribe massage without a trip to her office whenever I pull a muscle. That or a chiropractor you absolutely love.

We also need to find someone who will eradicate the evil from our home. So I’m thinking a good therapist might be the ticket for that.

Any ideas would be most appreciated. Thanks!

Here's one reply.
From Patty:
Regarding the evil in your home ….I have the following recommendations:
- burn sage at both the front and back door
- share more meals as a family
- spend more time drinking with friends
- yoga
- win the lottery
- pray
- call me for lunch dates

Good luck with all that.

winged bras

I'd like to share a little bit of work humor with you.

Actually, not much about work is really that funny. What was I thinking??
OK, let me share something else with you.

A few months ago I went shopping with my daughter. She wanted to go to a special lingerie store because she can now wear real-life woman bras. Let's call it a very famous underwear boutique that started out as a catalogue for men who wanted to outfit their wives in uncomfortable lacey stuff, and then the young sons of the aforementioned husbands would dig through the garbage to retrieve, pour, paw and drool over it. Anyway ... this place has since grown into a chain of high-end mall stores known for outfitting women who willingly want to wear uncomfortable lacey stuff, and thongs.

OK, I'm not a thong gal, in fact I make fun of women who wear thongs. This is going to make me seem naive, but it wasn't until a couple years ago that I even recognized what a thong on a bent-over woman looked like. Coincidentally it looks REALLY uncomfortable. There's a badly placed piece of fabric that looks like it goes right up the crack of the woman's ass. That's what it looks like. And when I actually learned that that's what it did, I hated thongs even more. Several of my friends tried to convince me that thongs were OK. They now wear the things to yoga or with exceptionally slinky clothing.
I still made fun of them.
So you can imagine my surprise when my daughter had an unwritten agenda the day we went to this store. She wanted me to buy my first thong.

Wait! My daughter is all of 14 years old. How could she even be savvy to the uncomfortable lacey culture, this trashy pseudo sexy stuff? When did I lose the Barbie battle? Really, shouldn't girls her age be riding horses or dreaming about playing Twister with their friends? No I guess not, because no one plays Twister while they're wearing a thong and apparently that's what my daughter and her girlfriends are wearing these days.

So I tried to think back. What was risqué when I was growing up?
Pink Candie shoes.
The Freak and the Shake, dances where you looked like you might be dangerous if you got close enough to a boy.
Drinking.
Driving really fast.
Smoking pot.
Dropping acid.
Some other stuff I won't go into here.
And visiting Planned Parenthood.

But we didn't wear thongs.

So I looked at thongs with my daughter. She picked out a very bland conservative model. It was beige. And it was a little wider and had a more pronounced little triangle in the front. But there is nothing you can do about the backend of a thong. Those things are what they are. They are thongs.

My horse

The horse I loved and mainly rode, by Mr. D’s accounts, was Alason, a former champion Mexican racing horse. As the story goes, he had won every race his owner had ever placed him in, until one day when his owner entered him into one-too-many races, and Alason finally lost.
The owner had bet on him, the farm and everything. It’s kind of sad, but that’s the story of how Alason ran his last race as a champion. He was handed over in a bet to a ranch owner who promptly trained him to barrel race. Alason showed promise early on, but ended up being too stubborn, so they gelded him.

By this time, the horse was 7 years old. When you geld a stallion too late it doesn’t do anything to the horse’s spirit but piss him off. It also makes him infertile. Former stallions don’t know that, they still react to everything just as Mother Nature would have any stallion react. And that’s about the time when Mr. D found him. They had a lot in common, those two. Both felt they were still virile, strong and masculine, the bond must have seemed more evident to Mr. D as he brought him back to the states and had his son train him to several levels of dressage. By the time I moved next door, it was Alason I saw in the paddock, rearing up for Mr. D's son.

As I rode Alason on this morning, it was very tempting for both of us to stay in the park as long as we could. I believe horses get just as bored as we do and I know he wanted to stay outside and run. Maybe he knew that when we returned to the stable, he would spend another day of standing in his stall, interrupted by moving outside to stand in the paddock, and then the highlight would be back into the stall to eat unless someone, usually me, took him out again. I turned Alason around and we headed home. Cars flew by us as we made our way through the neighborhood and back to the stable.

Mr. D would always worry about us while we were out on the city streets. But my mom never worried while I was out. She thought I was safer out there. Or she preferred that my girlfriend Lisa also be in the barn with me, especially late at night or early mornings.

“Was Lisa out with you this morning?” she asked.
“Mom, you know the answer to that, why do you ask?”
“I’m not comfortable with you being over there by yourself. I want you to always have a friend nearby.”
“I know, mom. But Lisa can’t make it over early in the morning during the week.” Lisa lived nearly a mile away on the other side of our old neighborhood and would come over to the stable in the afternoons after school when we didn’t have track practice.

“That’s not the point. The point is, you could get hurt over there and no one would even know.” I could see my mom thinking out her argument. She was smart, she knew I wouldn’t listen if she told me what to do, so she structured her argument on reason.

“What if a horse kicked you while you were cleaning out a stall?”
“That wouldn’t happen, mom. I’m always talking.” Then I added for emphasis, “They only kick when they’re surprised.”

My mom thought for a second, “What if someone else came in to the barn while you were behind a horse and it was scared? That would be out of your control.” Mom waited without showing any emotion. Had she really thought she could win this exchange so easily?

“Then someone would be in the barn, mom.” I quietly congratulated myself.
“True … but what if it were some little kid who didn’t know how or where to get help?”

I was too tired and too late for school to counterattack so I did the next best thing. I smiled at her. She returned a sly grin. She had gotten her point across, I had heard her. But she knew I would be back at the stable again.

And I suppose it was lucky for me that the margin of what was normal, to eccentric, to dangerously weird, was pretty wide in my family. But even then, I knew I couldn’t tell my mom everything that I already knew about Mr. D and his family.

Mr. D knew full well that if he kept the horses, the young girls would come by.